Now that Jamuary's over, I'm going to use this blog post to look back on it and highlight some of my favourite songs I made from it. I participated in order to get my creativity going again, and to practice actually finishing songs for a change. I kind of burnt out towards the end, only getting 25 songs done (if you want to count some of the later songs as "songs" that is), but that doesn't matter as much to me. I made some really cool songs and I'd like to talk about them here.
This is going to be more of a highlight reel than anything, and is going to go in order of what I want to talk about rather than when I released it, just to clear that up before I start talking about my songs.
This is the one I'd imagine most people have heard, as it got frontpaged. Thank you mods, very cool :) This one just sounds really good, I especially love the ending solo that takes up most of the song lol. I don't usually like to just fade out a song like this, as it's a bit cheesy imo, but it turned out nice. I also used a send and return track for the reverb like almost all of my songs, and decided to lower the dry signal before lowering the wet signal, which gives it a more unique sound.
These next three are the ones I made with lyrics, which make them all special to me. I feel this one went under the radar a bit, which is a shame since I spent a while working on it. It's a topic that's pretty important to me as a Canadian, and while I don't usually talk about politics I felt this was something worth sharing. It's also just an absolute banger song overall, I've gotten in stuck in my own head at times which definitely means I'm doing something right lmao
I went through a breakup just before the new year, which is what these lyrics are about. The vocals need rerecording and it could probably be mixed better, but this song is especially meaningful to me because of those lyrics.
It's a bit awkward putting this one right after, but I just think this one's really silly. I saw this meme one day, it was originally on Instagram but I lost that version so I found a different repost of it. I wondered how the chords would sound and that turned into a chorus, then I wrote lyrics relating to that meme and boom, I've got a song. It's honestly pretty catchy if I do say so myself. Fun fact: the vocals for this song were done in one take. Whether or not that's impressive or predictable is up to you.
Now that we're past the lyrical songs, the things I have to say about these songs aren't as interesting. However, some of them are still cool in their own ways, like this song. I always had the idea of making a song using only one fret on the guitar, inspired by this Rob Scallon video but in E standard tuning rather than the somewhat unconventional tuning he used. Every note in this song is played on the same fret, including the harmonics. Guess which fret it was.
This one wasn't terribly special to me personally, other than the effects I used on the drum samples which I thought was pretty cool. However, it did catch the attention of @Aalasteir who DMed me asking if they could use it as background music for their podcast, which made this song very special to me. If you're reading this, thanks again for reaching out! I really do appreciate it :)
By this point I've run out of significant things to talk about, so here's just a real quick list of every other song I think is still worth checking out. They're not perfect, but I still really enjoy them.
There are still some things to point out, like the interesting phrase lengths and polyrhythms in Havin' Fun and the fact that as far as I know, Black and Blue is the first blues song I've uploaded on Newgrounds. But all of these songs are great in their own ways and I'd recommend checking out any number of songs on this post, I'm quite happy with how they all turned out.
In conclusion, while I may have "failed" Jamuary, I'm still happy I participated and got all these cool songs done. It's definitely more about the creative process than the outcome, and when you're burnt out to the point of just posting weird sounds posed as "songs", it's definitely time to throw in the towel lol. That being said, a lot of great songs came from this and I'm happy for that.
That's all I have to say. Have a great rest of the year!
